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Improving diffusion-based protein backbone generation with global-geometry-aware latent encoding

delete2025-06-18
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PRE
AI
Y
Yuyang Zhang
Y
Yuhang Liu
Z
Zinnia Ma
李民 cover
李民 (Min Li)
C
Chunfu Xu *
龚
龚海鹏 (Haipeng Gong) *
DOI:10.1038/s42256-025-01059-xdelete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The global structural properties of a protein, such as shape, fold and topology, strongly affect its function. Although recent breakthroughs in diffusion-based generative models have greatly advanced de novo protein design, particularly in generating diverse and realistic structures, it remains challenging to design proteins of specific geometries without residue-level control over the topological details. A more practical, top-down approach is needed for prescribing the overall geometric arrangements of secondary structure elements in the generated protein structures. In response, we propose TopoDiff, an unsupervised framework that learns and exploits a global-geometry-aware latent representation, enabling both unconditional and controllable diffusion-based protein generation. Trained on the Protein Data Bank and CATH datasets, the structure encoder embeds protein global geometries into a 32-dimensional latent space, from which latent codes sampled by the latent sampler serve as informative conditions for the diffusion-based backbone decoder. In benchmarks against existing baselines, TopoDiff demonstrates comparable performance on established metrics including designability, diversity and novelty, as well as markedly improves coverage over the fold types of natural proteins in the CATH dataset. Moreover, latent conditioning enables versatile manipulations at the global-geometry level to control the generated protein structures, through which we derived a number of novel folds of mainly beta proteins with comprehensive experimental validation. A variational-autoencoder-based diffusion architecture that enables topological controls on the diffusion-based protein structure generation is proposed. As a result, novel folds of mainly beta proteins can be designed with experimental validation.

Journal

Nature Machine Intelligence cover
Nature Machine Intelligence
IF:
23.9
Papers:
1.3K
Citations:
1.5W

Organization

N
National Center for Protein Sciences
Scholars:
35
Papers: 12
Citations: 0
N
National Institute of Biological Sciences
Scholars:
223
Papers: 67
Citations: 3.4K
D
Department of Bioengineering
Scholars:
592
Papers: 252
Citations: 0
S
School of Life Sciences
Scholars:
3.9K
Papers: 1.2K
Citations: 9
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Cited Papers

Cited Papers

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Protein folds and functions
err1998-07-01
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errOAAI
errAndrew CR Martin; Christine A Orengo; E Gail Hutchinson; Susan Jones; Maria Karmirantzou; Roman A Laskowski; John BO Mitchell; Chiara Taroni; Janet M Thornton
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Generating tertiary protein structures via interpretable graph variational autoencoders
err2021-11-29
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errOAAI
errXiaojie Guo; Yuanqi Du; Sivani Tadepalli; Liang Zhao; Amarda Shehu
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Validation of de novo designed water‐soluble and transmembrane β‐barrels by in silico folding and melting
err2024-06-12
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PREAI
errAlvaro Martin Hermosilla; Carolin Berner; Sergey Ovchinnikov; Anastassia A. Vorobieva
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An all-atom protein generative model
err2024-06-25
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errOAAI
errChu, Alexander E.; Kim, Jinho; Cheng, Lucy; El Nesr, Gina; Xu, Minkai; Shuai, Richard W.; Huang, Po-Ssu
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Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
err2021-07-15
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errOAAI
errJohn Jumper; Richard Evans; Alexander Pritzel; Tim Green; Michael Figurnov; Olaf Ronneberger; Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool; Russ Bates; Augustin Žídek; Anna Potapenko; Alex Bridgland; Clemens Meyer; Simon A. A. Kohl; Andrew J. Ballard; Andrew Cowie; Bernardino Romera-Paredes; Stanislav Nikolov; Rishub Jain; Jonas Adler; Trevor Back; Stig Petersen; David Reiman; Ellen Clancy; Michal Zielinski; Martin Steinegger; Michalina Pacholska; Tamas Berghammer; Sebastian Bodenstein; David Silver; Oriol Vinyals; Andrew W. Senior; Koray Kavukcuoglu; Pushmeet Kohli; Demis Hassabis
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